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A merge replication environment with alternate synchronization partners may not succeed after you change the retention period on the primary publication or on the main publication. Immediately after you apply the change, subscriptions still can successfully synchronize with the main publication. But after you apply the failover steps to the alternate synchronization partners, the merge agent may not succeed, and you may receive the following error message:

Category:NULL
Source: Merge Process
Number: -2147200940
Message: The Publisher has been restored from a backup whose schema change version is different from the Subscriber.
Rerun the Snapshot Agent and reinitialize the subscription.

After this, the alternate synchronization environment does not continue to work. You can still merge with the publisher that you synchronized with first after you changed the retention period, but all tries to synchronize with the other partners do not succeed. Even if you reinitialize the alternate synchronization partners and the subscribers, this action does not help.

Service pack information

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Hotfix information

This problem is fixed for SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 2 systems that are running version 8.00.0729.

The problem exists in SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3, version 8.00.0760. To fix this version, you must apply SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 rollup, version 8.00.0765.

The English version of
this fix has the file attributes (or later) that are listed in the following
table. The dates and times for these files are listed in coordinated universal
time (UTC). When you view the file information, it is converted to local time.
To find the difference between UTC and local time, use the Time Zone tab in the Date and Time tool in Control Panel.

SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 2

Use this hotfix build for a server that is running SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 2.

This hotfix is also available in the MS03-031 security patch.
For additional information about the MS03-031 security patch, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: